Latest / Tabernacle Talk - A Bible Study Podcast with Pastor Bryon Self / Psalm 115 - Jesus Is Greater Than Idols

Transcript

Psalm 115 - Jesus Is Greater Than Idols · Tabernacle Talk - A Bible Study Podcast with Pastor Bryon Self

• 0:00
  Welcome to Tabernacle Talk. Tabernacle Talk is a Bible study
• 0:03
  podcast brought from Tabernacle Baptist Church in Essex, MD.
• 0:07
  I'm your host, Brian Self. We hope this podcast encourages
• 0:10
  you to know Christ, grow in his word, and show his love to
• 0:14
  others. Let's dive right in.
• 0:15
  Welcome back to Tabernacle Talk today.
• 0:18
  I'm actually, at the time of recording, just about to head
• 0:21
  out for a few things that I'm doing over this upcoming weekend
• 0:26
  for our state convention and dropping kids off with my sister
• 0:30
  and my brother-in-law. And being able to spend some
• 0:33
  time at a church plant in Salisbury, MD with one of our
• 0:36
  BCMD church planters and prayer leaders and, and Send network
• 0:42
  guys. Just a whole ton of really,
• 0:43
  really great stuff that I'm looking forward to with the BCM
• 0:47
  DS annual gathering. This is a time where we get to
• 0:50
  celebrate what God has done through our family of about 600
• 0:53
  churches or so over the past year and look forward to what
• 0:57
  God will do in the next year. And so I'm just stoked.
• 1:01
  But that does mean I have to go a little bit quicker today.
• 1:05
  This won't be one of our 30 minute episodes or my wife might
• 1:09
  kill me. So if I go missing, you know
• 1:12
  why? Let's read Psalm 115.
• 1:14
  This is one of the halal psalms. This is one of the Psalms that
• 1:17
  Jesus would have sang with his disciples the week of his death.
• 1:22
  This was also a song that would have been done during the
• 1:25
  Passover season each year for the children of Israel.
• 1:29
  And so it carries some special memories of what God did for
• 1:32
  them in the past in taking them out of Egypt, as well as their
• 1:36
  hope for the future in providing the Messiah.
• 1:39
  And so let's read through this Psalm and see what our God has
• 1:43
  for us today in His Word. Not to us, Yahweh, not to us,
• 1:47
  but to your name. Give glory because of your
• 1:50
  faithful love, because of your truth.
• 1:53
  Why should the nation say, where is their God?
• 1:56
  Our God is in heaven and does whatever He pleases.
• 2:00
  Their idols are silver and gold made by human hands.
• 2:04
  They have mouths, but can't speak E eyes but can't see.
• 2:08
  They have ears but cannot hear, noses but cannot smell.
• 2:13
  They have hands but cannot feel, feet but cannot walk.
• 2:17
  They cannot make a sound with their throats.
• 2:20
  Those who make them are just like them, as are all who trust
• 2:25
  in them. Israel trust in Yahweh, He is
• 2:28
  their help and shield. House of Aaron trust in Yahweh,
• 2:33
  He is their help and shield. You who fear Yahweh trust in
• 2:38
  Yahweh. He is their help and shield.
• 2:41
  Yahweh remembers us and will bless us.
• 2:44
  He will bless the House of Israel.
• 2:46
  He will bless the House of Aaron.
• 2:47
  He will bless those who fear Yahweh, small and great alike.
• 2:52
  May Yahweh add to your numbers, both yours and your children's.
• 2:56
  May you be blessed by Yahweh, the Maker of heaven and earth.
• 3:00
  The heavens are Yahweh's, but the earth He has given to the
• 3:04
  human race. It is not the dead who prays
• 3:06
  Yahweh, nor any of those descending into the silence of
• 3:10
  death, but we will bless Yahweh both now and forever.
• 3:14
  Hallelujah, man, even knowing what next week's Tabernacle talk
• 3:22
  is on Psalm 116, the verse 17 in Psalm 115 hits really hard
• 3:29
  talking about it's not the dead who praise the Lord, no, any of
• 3:31
  those descending into the silence of death.
• 3:35
  There's there's an element when we think of the Psalms, we think
• 3:38
  about our human perspective, our human mindset, and so many of
• 3:44
  these things can often ring true.
• 3:47
  Jesus comes along and he just jumbles all of the categories
• 3:51
  for reasons that we're going to go into in a second.
• 3:54
  So let's look first breaking down the Psalm verses one
• 3:57
  through three, there is the cry from Israel that God would
• 4:03
  glorify himself because of his faithful, his covenant love that
• 4:08
  has said, and because of his truth, because the nations are
• 4:12
  currently saying that Israel's God is nowhere to be seen.
• 4:17
  But the writer here, I'm going to say David the psalmist might
• 4:22
  be a more accurate way to phrase this.
• 4:24
  The psalmist says, well, our God exists, He's still here, He's
• 4:28
  not gone, but he does whatever he wants.
• 4:31
  The God of Israel was not just the person that would do
• 4:35
  whatever Israel wanted him to do.
• 4:38
  No, if you will, Israel was supposed to do whatever their
• 4:41
  God wanted them to do, but they were not doing that.
• 4:44
  And so as a result, there was these hard circumstances.
• 4:49
  So verse 1, he says, not to us, Yahweh, not to us, but to your
• 4:55
  name, give glory. He says, I don't want people to
• 4:57
  say Israel is so great. You can think about it perhaps
• 5:00
  for for your church or for your nation.
• 5:03
  We don't want to say, OK, America is wonderful.
• 5:08
  America is great. We want to say God is great.
• 5:11
  God is the one to be praised. We don't want to say, you know,
• 5:14
  Tabernacle Baptist Church, man, that is an amazing place filled
• 5:19
  with wonderful people. No, no, I want it to be said,
• 5:22
  God is glorified at Tabernacle. When I go to Tabernacle, I feel
• 5:27
  as though I am interacting with the presence of God and that His
• 5:31
  love and His Spirit is at work here.
• 5:34
  Here's that cry from the psalmist.
• 5:36
  Not to us, but to your name. Give glory.
• 5:38
  And then he gives the why. He says because of your faithful
• 5:41
  love and because of your truth. God, You said that you were
• 5:44
  going to do this, so I'm asking that you would follow through on
• 5:48
  your promises. And holding God to His promises
• 5:52
  is a wonderful thing. It's what He calls us over and
• 5:55
  over and over again in Scripture to do.
• 5:58
  And here the psalmist says it yet again.
• 6:00
  And he says because of your faithful love, because you have
• 6:02
  made a covenant with your people, don't go back on it.
• 6:06
  Don't go back on the covenant. Now we recognize even from
• 6:10
  Deuteronomy, like 31 through 34, that in the old covenant there
• 6:16
  was this promise that said, Israel, if you walk away from
• 6:19
  the Lord, if you are worshipping false idols, if you are ignoring
• 6:23
  what your God has told you, he will send you back to the
• 6:26
  nations that he brought you from.
• 6:29
  And so even in that extent, as they're here praying because of
• 6:32
  your faithful love, because of your covenant, we recognize
• 6:35
  well, yes, but you guys, you, you broke the covenant.
• 6:39
  And so it's kind of odd for you guys to say, yes, I know we
• 6:42
  broke the covenant, but God, you hold up your end of the bargain.
• 6:46
  Now, God is faithful and good, and he did.
• 6:49
  He did hold up His end, if you will, of the bargain, even
• 6:53
  through Israeli faithlessness. And for us, for the new
• 6:56
  covenant, how much more? Because our covenant is not God
• 7:01
  saying if you do this then I will bless you, but if you do
• 7:04
  this I will curse you. Instead.
• 7:06
  What we are promised is that there is therefore now no
• 7:09
  condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus that the covenant
• 7:14
  He has made with us is a covenant based on the
• 7:16
  righteousness and the finished work of Christ.
• 7:18
  It is not a covenant based on your good works or on mine.
• 7:23
  So we can call out to the Lord as well in our times of fear and
• 7:28
  struggle and hurt. God give glory to your name
• 7:31
  because of your faithful love, because of the promise you made
• 7:35
  to us, and because of your Word God follow through.
• 7:39
  Then verse 2, why should the nation say where is their God?
• 7:42
  People will always look at the lives of Christians.
• 7:45
  They will always look at churches and they'll go, well,
• 7:47
  if their God really was real, then they wouldn't go through
• 7:51
  hard times. They wouldn't be struggling
• 7:54
  financially, they wouldn't lose a loved one, they wouldn't have
• 7:57
  this fighting that's going on. But the truth is our God, verse
• 8:01
  3 is in heaven and does whatever he pleases.
• 8:06
  So sometimes God leads us through.
• 8:08
  There's an old hymn, God leads us along, some through the
• 8:12
  waters, some through the fire, some through great sorrow, but
• 8:16
  all through the blood God leads us along in all of these very
• 8:20
  seasons of our lives. And so don't be like the world,
• 8:24
  don't be like the nations. I think here this Hebrew word is
• 8:27
  likely going, yes, it is. Why?
• 8:31
  This is all of the groups of people that don't know the Lord.
• 8:35
  And here the psalmist says, why should these people that don't
• 8:39
  know you, Why should they think that you don't exist or that
• 8:42
  you're not really there? No God, I'm asking you to move
• 8:46
  in such a way that everyone knows you are alive and active.
• 8:51
  And I think that's a wonderful prayer to pray.
• 8:53
  But I think verse 3 can also remind us that when God doesn't
• 8:57
  do what we please, that doesn't mean that He's not there.
• 9:00
  It just means He is the one that has the better vantage point.
• 9:05
  He is the one who knows what we truly need, not just what we
• 9:08
  want. And His purposes are eternal
• 9:11
  purposes for all of humanity. And so there will be times that
• 9:17
  we go through hardships so that five, 10/15/20 years down the
• 9:21
  line, we are able to minister to someone in that same spot and
• 9:26
  that they're able to experience greater richness in their
• 9:30
  relationship with God, maybe enter into a relationship with
• 9:33
  God for the very first time as a result of the hardship that we
• 9:36
  go through. And we might say, man, this
• 9:38
  hardship, I can't see how God would be glorified in it.
• 9:43
  But we can't see the rest of our story.
• 9:45
  We can't see everyone else's story that's also involved.
• 9:49
  And so we just have to trust that our God, who has the better
• 9:53
  vantage point in heaven, in the skies, he will do whatever he
• 9:57
  pleases and whatever he pleases is always ultimately good and
• 10:02
  right and holy and kind. And the we can't see it right
• 10:05
  now. I promise you, you will see it
• 10:08
  in eternity. It's just a wait for the reveal.
• 10:12
  It's not you don't have to go. OK, I guess I'll just never know
• 10:17
  why these bad things happen. No, we will know because God
• 10:20
  glories to tell his riches and his story to us.
• 10:25
  So just wait and I promise the big reveal is coming.
• 10:29
  Verses 4 through 8 talk about instead of trusting in God who
• 10:34
  they can't see, these nations, they trust in idols.
• 10:38
  And the psalmist contrast this fact that though our God is in
• 10:43
  the sky, sees in the heavens, these idols are just made by
• 10:47
  human hands out of materials that humans find and craft and
• 10:50
  create silver and gold. And he talks about the fact they
• 10:53
  have mouths, but their mouths are useless.
• 10:56
  They have eyes, but their eyes can't see.
• 10:58
  They have ears but they can't hear, noses but they can't smell
• 11:01
  hands that can't feel and feed that cannot walk.
• 11:05
  He says they cannot make a sound with their throats.
• 11:07
  And he says those who make them are just like them, as are all
• 11:11
  who trust in in them. There's a recurring theme
• 11:14
  throughout the Old Testament, which is you become what you
• 11:18
  worship. You become what you worship.
• 11:21
  So the things that you look up to, the things that you devote
• 11:24
  your finances to, that is what you are going to become.
• 11:29
  You will start being like that person.
• 11:32
  I can think right now in our world, there's a lot of
• 11:35
  influencers and bloggers and you can always tell when a person
• 11:39
  has spent too much time watching or listening to a particular
• 11:44
  style of influencer Blogger because their facial
• 11:48
  expressions, the their vocal cadence, their vocabulary, their
• 11:52
  tone, the way they talk about their, their enemies, you go,
• 11:56
  Oh, well, that is a this type of person fan.
• 12:01
  And they have become just like their idol.
• 12:06
  And this is true not just for like celebrity influencers.
• 12:11
  This can be true for some people, for their politicians or
• 12:15
  their news networks. Then all of a sudden people that
• 12:18
  are supposed to be Christians are using vocabulary and
• 12:21
  language that you go, whoa, that didn't come from, you know,
• 12:24
  their time in the word, that didn't come from listening to
• 12:27
  preaching of God's word that hopefully didn't come from, you
• 12:30
  know, small group study time. No, that came from all the time
• 12:33
  that they've spent devoted to this particular network, this
• 12:38
  particular politician that all of a sudden they're throwing
• 12:41
  aside biblical truth in favor of.
• 12:45
  Well, but I think what is best for our nation is to follow this
• 12:50
  plan is to think this way about this group of people.
• 12:54
  And that can go for whether you're a Republican, a Democrat,
• 12:58
  an independent, this, that or the other.
• 13:00
  Just recognize you become what you worship and you don't really
• 13:05
  get to choose what you worship. All of us worship something.
• 13:08
  Some of us worship gods of entertainment.
• 13:10
  Some of us worship gods of politics.
• 13:12
  Some of us worship gods of business and enterprise and
• 13:18
  making money. Some of us worship gods of even
• 13:22
  family. And why I don't have time to
• 13:25
  dive into all of it today. I, I have known people in all of
• 13:29
  those various realms that that that was what they worshipped.
• 13:34
  On the flip side, so we can become like the world.
• 13:38
  We can become like the people and things that we worship, or
• 13:42
  we can become like our God. And I think the flip side of
• 13:46
  everything in verses 4 through 8 is true, especially of Jesus.
• 13:49
  And as I think about that, he sang this song the week of his
• 13:54
  crucifixion or shortly before his crucifixion.
• 13:59
  Jesus is the one. So I'm going to kind of read
• 14:02
  through verses 4 through 8, but I'm going to flip it.
• 14:05
  So Jesus is flesh and blood. God became flesh, not silver and
• 14:10
  gold. He became flesh.
• 14:12
  He was not made by human hands. He was made by the Holy Spirit
• 14:17
  in the womb of Mary. He had a mouth that spoke, and
• 14:23
  His words that he spoke were the words of eternal life.
• 14:27
  As Peter said, He had eyes that looking out on the people.
• 14:31
  He had compassion on them because they were lost and
• 14:35
  wandering like a sheep without a shepherd.
• 14:38
  He had ears that could hear and he heard the cry of the woman at
• 14:44
  the well who had five husbands and was now with someone that
• 14:47
  was not her husband, who needed eternal life.
• 14:50
  And he heard her. He was the one that heard the
• 14:54
  the cry of the the parents that lost children and he raised them
• 15:02
  back to life again. He was the one that heard the
• 15:04
  cry of the lepers. He was the one he he, he just,
• 15:09
  he heard the hurting, he heard the needy, those needing
• 15:13
  salvation. He listened to them.
• 15:17
  He had a nose that could smell the the meals that they shared
• 15:23
  together, that could smell the the bread or the fish that he
• 15:26
  passed out to the 5000. He had hands that could feel,
• 15:32
  hands that felt the nails and feet that walked.
• 15:38
  They were the ultimate feat that that shared the gospel of peace,
• 15:43
  the good news of the gospel, and they were the feet that were
• 15:48
  pierced on the cross for us. He made a sound with his throat.
• 15:53
  Father, forgive them for they do not know what they are doing.
• 15:57
  And verse #8 no one made him. He is not a, a created being in
• 16:05
  in his existence as God the Son. He is eternal, but all of those
• 16:11
  who worship him become like him, Christ like existing in the
• 16:15
  fruit of the Spirit. And through following him and
• 16:18
  recognizing and worshipping him, we become not like our world.
• 16:23
  We become like our God. I'm going to kind of shore up
• 16:30
  here at the end, verses 9 through 13, there's the call to
• 16:34
  trust in God because He is our help and our shield.
• 16:38
  This word help is probably, Yep, it's the word easier.
• 16:41
  So it's the same word that's used in Genesis 2, that Eve is a
• 16:46
  help for Adam. Like here the Lord is a help to
• 16:51
  Israel and to the House of Aaron and to those who fear the Lord.
• 16:55
  And God is the one that is beside us.
• 16:57
  He cares for us. He's right there.
• 16:58
  Like I think of Samantha as my spouse.
• 17:01
  She is the one that is always right there for me.
• 17:04
  And the Lord is our present help, the one who can come
• 17:07
  alongside us and help us. And He is our shield, the one
• 17:10
  that protects us. He remembers us.
• 17:13
  He blesses us. He blesses those who fear the
• 17:16
  Lord, small and great alike. It doesn't matter if you're a
• 17:19
  little kid watching this or listening to this, or if you are
• 17:24
  a powerful politician in Washington DC who somehow came
• 17:27
  across this. God will bless you.
• 17:30
  He remembers you as you were. Worship and fear and love Him.
• 17:35
  And then verse 14 starts a benediction.
• 17:37
  May the Lord add to your numbers, both yours and your
• 17:40
  children's. May you have a lineage.
• 17:43
  Verse 15, May you be blessed by Yahweh, the maker of heaven and
• 17:47
  earth. The skies and the land were
• 17:48
  created by God, and that's the God who wants to bless you.
• 17:51
  Even today. It says the heavens are
• 17:53
  Yahweh's, but the earth He has given to the human race.
• 17:56
  Would you show this earth what God is like today?
• 18:01
  Through how you speak and how you pray and how you love and
• 18:04
  how you care for others, how you work?
• 18:07
  May you show everyone else what God is like #17 It's not the
• 18:13
  dead who prays Yahweh, nor any of those descending into the
• 18:15
  silence of death. This was the case.
• 18:18
  It is not the case anymore that as soon as we pass from this
• 18:22
  life, the apostle Paul tells us to be absent from the body is to
• 18:25
  be present with the Lord. And even though we are dead, yet
• 18:29
  we live and we can praise Him both now and forever and thank
• 18:35
  our God that He has conquered death and the grave.
• 18:38
  So verse 18, we will bless Yahweh both now and forever.
• 18:42
  Hallelujah. That is praise the Lord, I've
• 18:47
  attached a great song that I love from this particular Psalm
• 18:50
  Receive the glory by Sovereign Grace Music and you can listen
• 18:54
  to that and one of my favorite songs that Sovereign Grace Music
• 18:58
  has put out and that's saying something because I I love
• 19:02
  Sovereign Grace Music. But looking forward to next
• 19:04
  week. Psalm 116, one of my favorite
• 19:07
  Psalms in out of all 150 and it is so rich and amazing and
• 19:14
  looking forward to that time together.
• 19:15
  Thanks for tuning in.